Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The Daley Dozen: Wednesday

1. Sam MacCrory has a wonderful counterfactual about politics on 2015.2. Wife in the North wants to see more women involved in the election. Did she get her wish today?3. Ed Staite on the communications lessons from the election campaign so far.4. Capitalists@Work think Brown is caught in an iron grid.5. J'Accuse critiques my Telegraph article on internet politics.6. Sean Haffey on Labour's economic record.7. Last Ditch reckons I am not a Conservative.8. Sunder Katwala isn't impressed by Vince.9. Vikas Pota's election diary.10. Peter Bingle thinks Mrs Duffy is owed a peerage.11. Iain Martin has the exclusive transcript of the Brown apology to Mrs Duffy.12. Lightwater thinks it's not just Brown who's had a shambolic day. Clegg has too.

13 comments:

It's not a counterfactual if the idea treated isn't something that hasn't already actually happened. This type of construct is also known as the hypothetical or third conditional. It takes the past perfect in the 'if' clause. For instance: "If Margaret Thatcher hadn't been stabbed in the back by a gang of Tory wets in 1990, then she would probably have gone on and on and on. She'd also probably still be PM now and the whole world would be a rather different place."

But she was, so she didn't and it isn't.

That's an all possible worlds counterfactual semantic thought experiment that helps us to frame and understand more deeply causality in any given, arbitrarily demarcated historical narrative.

It has nothing to do with totally implausible, fantasy futures dreamt up by political activists with absolutely nothing better to do, some speculative Clegg government facing problems in 2015 (or a Clegg government period) being a perfect case in point.

But hey, it's a cool word, right? Sounds like it fits and should impress the readers. So who cares?

It seems to be being put about that the whole problem with Mrs Duffy was caused by Brown mishearing the word “flocking” for something else.

This would make sense if Mrs Duffy had said “flocking immigrants”. The problem is that she didn’t say this. What she did was mention Eastern European immigrants and then in the next sentence she said “Where are they flocking from?”

Now, does anyone think that mentioning immigrants and then saying “Where are they f******g from?” makes any sense? Saying such a thing doesn’t make any sense at all and certainly wouldn’t be thought of as an insult against immigrants because the listener would be trying to understand what the hell was being said and probably failing.

Yesterday I thought Brown was finished as a result of the Mrs Duffy affair, but looking at the blanket negative coverage in the papers on the Sky News website, I'm starting to think that maybe the media is overdoing it a bit and that Brown may end up being the recipient of a small sympathy vote. Quite a lot of people probably haven't forgotten the press's attempt to gang up on Nick Clegg last week and this might look to some of them as the same kind of thing again but against Brown this time. After all, everyone says things in private about people they profess to like in public. It's that knowledge that may help Brown.

How humiliating, to have the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom simply sit in a radio booth and listen to his private grumbling played to all, before wasting a three hour return trip to grovel an apology.